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Many of you may have noticed that our site was down for the majority of yesterday. I’m still not sure what happened, but I was alerted that around 10am, people were getting 500 Internal Server Errors. Somewhere between then and 12pm, people started to get redirected to 127.0.0.1.

I contacted 1and1 (our web hosting provider) and the first tier customer support had no idea what was going on. I knew it was still reaching their servers since pages requiring basic auth still prompted for credentials. But afterwards, it’d still redirect you to 127.0.0.1. They told me they were going to escalate the issue. I inquire what the ETA is to fix and they told me they had no idea. I asked when I should call back if the issue is not resolved. At first they told me 24 hours. Then they say it may take up to 48 hours. I was not pleased with the response, but I guess that’s what you get for cheap hosting.

After 12 hours of down time, I decide to move my site onto DreamHost temporarily. During this move, I made some changes that’ll make my life easier if I decide to port it onto another server. It was a good thing I still had shell access to my 1and1 account. Hurray for rsync for making my life super easy. I was also able to access the databases to get the latest updates since our last backup.

I also took some time to move the blog onto it’s own subdomain. All previous links will still work as they’ll be redirected to http://blog.hd-trailers.net/. If you do see broken links or things not working in general, please do report the issue. Having the blog on a different subdomain served a couple purposes:

It allows us to bypass the WordPress cookie for our main catalog.

It allows us to run each site under a different user.

I apologize for any inconvenience this had cause. Maybe it’s time I get a dedicated server.

For those that don’t follow us on Twitter or Facebook… you’re really missing out! Besides frequent news updates and trailer recommendations, we also post tons of neat HD videos that are shared with us.

Anyway, I decided that this new video was worth blogging about and sharing with all you folks out there:

“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.
This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.

www.sintel.org

You can find the download links on their website: Sintel – Open Movie Project, which includes DivX, MP4 Surround 5.1, MP4 Stereo, and OGV Stereo.

This appears to be several months old, but nonetheless is rather awesome. VadoskiN has put together a compilation of some rather awesome trailer shots together with some great trailer music. Enjoy! (Source)

A lot of people are claiming to have the HD trailer/teaser for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but I have yet to find any copy that’s 480p or better. Cianan sent in this link which provides the trailer in 360p (9.33MB). I’ve also uploaded it to mirror sites just in case: RapidShare and Hotfile.

Given that this isn’t HD, I’m not going to file it under movies, but news instead. Enjoy!

I just noticed AOL/Moviefone has launched a new page: Top HD Trailers. It’s very similar to MySpace’s Trailer Park. However, they offer no download option and everything goes through Flash. The resolution it plays at is 480p and the quality is rather decent. Too bad they don’t offer 720p or 1080p options nor a way to go full screen.

Update: I realize I calculated the resolution incorrectly. It’s really only playing at 480p and not 720p as noted earlier.

Recently, Alex and I have noticed that Apple has begun watermarking their trailers. They’ve added the Apple logo (as seen to the left) to the bottom right corner to most if not all their new movie trailers.

This has been going for few weeks already. The first set of trailers I noticed this was around late September when the trailer for Waltz With Bashir and Breakfast With Scot came out. At first, I thought they only watermarked exclusive or independent movie trailers, but later on I noticed they watermarked mainstream movie trailers available at multiple sites.

It’s not annoying per se, but does somewhat ruin a perfectly good high definition trailer. It’s sort of like people who watermark their photos so others can’t steal them.

It’s rather impressive. It supports 1280×720 (720p) and although it’s streaming, it starts playing pretty much immediately. There’s probably a lot of compression going on and it’s probably buffering during the initial 5 second ad. I have to say, I’m impressed by the quality and steaming capability.